The tragic story of the village of the Zorbs

Once upon a time there was a people of strange creatures called the Zorbs. These hairy beings lived in a secluded valley of the Carpathians, and had never met the human species. The Zorbs only fed on one thing: apple pies. They had no needs or dreams other than eating apple pies. To make these apple pies, the Zorbs picked apples in their forests, harvested wild wheat scattered in the wild and made the pies by hand. They were very dependent on nature, and it took long hours of picking and working at each Zorb to get one apple pie a week.

Winter

One winter, the Zorbs decided to get together and found a village. They succeeded in domesticating wild wheat and apple and growing them in the fields of the village. By organizing themselves to distribute apple picking, wheat milling and pie making, they greatly improved their standard of living: now each Zorb could count on an apple pie every two or three days. Not as much as the Zorbs dreamed of at night, but enough to avoid starvation.

Spring

One spring day, a smarter Zorb than the others, called Henriforb, made an ingenious invention: a wheat grinding machine. This machine greatly changed the lives of the Zorbs: of all the Zorbs who were involved in grinding the wheat, only one was needed - the others were able to contribute to the other tasks, which greatly increased the production of apple pies. At the end of spring, each Zorb ate one pie a day.

Summer

Henriforb was very clever. Continuing his momentum, in the early summer he invented a pie making machine. What a revolution! Now he only needed two Zorbs to run the wheat grinders and pie making machines.

Thanks to his machine, Henriforb would go for about twenty pies a day, but he never seemed to have enough. He quickly realized that in order to make sure he would never run out of pies, he had to make sure that the supply of wheat and apples would never stop. As a result, he exchanged the exclusive property of the village's wheat fields and apple trees for pies.

He hired half the Zorb people to work in his fields and orchard for a generous fee of three pies a day. The others showed their anger: how would they survive? After long debates, the Zorbs who worked in Henriforb's fields agreed to stand together and pour a apple pie a day to the unemployed. The village continued to live peacefully.

Autumn

The fall began with a tragedy: Henriforb swallowed his 23rd pie of the day, and died of suffocation before anyone could help him. His son Stivjorb inherited his machines and fields.

Stivjorb had also inherited from his father an introduction to machine operation and a taste for invention. Soon after, he managed to make a robot that could grow and harvest as much wheat and apples as a hundred Zorbs together. Very logically, he dismissed the Zorbs who were working in his fields, making him make substantial savings: no need to distribute three pies a day to all these Zorbs! He chose three Zorbs he found sympathetic to run the machines and the robot. He decided that he would only give them two pies a day - and if they weren't happy they could go elsewhere. Of course, they accepted with gratitude.

Stivjorb quickly realized that, despite his appetite, his machines produced far too many pies for his own consumption. Still, he was always afraid he'd run out of pies someday. So he made another brilliant invention: the freezer. All the pies that he produced and that he couldn't eat, he collected in his freezer, which he had built absolutely gigantic, and which was filling up every day a little more.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Zorb population was completely deprived. One day, an assembly of hungry Zorbs came to visit him to make a request: would he agree to give even one pie a day to every Zorb in the village? Stivjorb found the query highly misplaced:

Why should I give you pies for free? Isn't it my father who invented his machines? Didn't he buy the fields with your consent? Didn't I invent and manufacture the robot? And you lazy bunch of lazy bums would like to get apple pies without working?"

Poor Zorbs had no choice. They left the village and returned to the forest, where they painstakingly resumed the apple picking, the harvest of the apples, and the harvest of the apples.